Changes in the manner of publishing and disseminating physics information have been coming faster and faster during the last decade or so, and with them they have brought an increasingly urgent need for changes in copyrighting procedures and practices. Every user of American Institute of Physics and its member societies’ journals is bound to be affected in some way, as will be the authors contributing to the journals, when journal copyright ambiguities and inconsistencies are clarified. Will the individual physicist, or his library, be able to continue purchasing primary journals and secondary‐information products at fair market prices—or will he be subsidizing the commercial use of these products in some other form, or in some other country? Will the one quarter of all AIP society members who (according to one count) themselves contribute, as authors, to the physics literature at some time or other be completely clear as to their rights to protect the scientific integrity of their own published works? Or will they find that questions concerning the re‐use of their works dissolve into a fog of international disagreements?.

1.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Jess Stein, ed), Random House, New York (1966); page 323.
2.
Omnibus Copyright Revision: Comparative Analysis of the Issues, Cambridge Research Institute (American Society for Information Science), Washington D.C. (1973); page 97.
3.
See Copyright: Current Viewpoints on History, Laws and Legislation (A. Kent, H. Lanour, eds), Bowker, New York (1972); and reference 2.
4.
H. W. Koch, “Support the Communications Revolution,” editorial in PHYSICS TODAY, February 1973, page 88.
5.
Biological Abstracts, 56(4), 15 August 1973.
6.
Information, Part 1, 5(2), 66 (1973).
7.
Reference 2, page 90.
8.
Reference 2, page 161.
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